December 31, 2011

Yesterday’s coding session with CSS was fantastic. I used WinWarden to make my browser translucent, and I overlaid it on my reference documents. This made it a breeze to check alignment, because I didn’t have to use any measuring tools. I used Chrome’s developer tools to manually adjust the stylesheets until things looked right, adding display: block to the parts I was working with. Then I copied the numbers into my SASS file so that it could generate the CSS.

I also found a GIMP script for exporting all layers as separate images. I had to rename a few layers, but the results made it much easier to flip through images instead of toggling visibility trying to find the logos I needed. (It turned out that the logos were not included, so I’ve asked the design firm to send them to me.)

I converted the complex front page into a Drupal panel layout, getting rid of thirteen regions that were cluttering up the main block management screen. This also makes it much easier to update the content, yay! I’m looking forward to converting other pages. The previous developer used multiple regions instead of controlling visibility through configuration, so there are a lot of templates and regions.

Dual-screen worked out great, too, although I still need to fiddle a little with my ergonomics to make sure everything works out.

I’m looking forward to making this even better. I’ve only got a few more weeks on this project, but I might take on more styling in the future if it turns out I can deal with the headaches associated with cross-browser styling.

After I get the rest of the basic requirements in place, I want to automate testing and screenshots, particularly for regression-checking and for cross-browser compatibility. Selenium and WebDriver look like the way to go if I want to simulate hover events. If I can’t figure out how to use WebDriver within the time I’ll set aside for learning this, I can use JQuery to fake toggling the classes. Automated screenshots + PDF Split and Merge + ImageMagick for compositing (maybe 50% opacity?) will make it easy to spot glaring errors.

That will have to wait for next week. In the meantime, there’s a three-day weekend ahead, so I’m going to make lots of progress on Quantified Awesome. Yay!